Clearlake II - Day 6 - After Thanksgiving Dinner

Current position "20:47.8N 27:00.5W". The attached pic shows the crew sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner – Turkey, sweet potato, new potatoes, courgette (zucchini for those on the East side of the Atlantic), sweet-corn, cranberry sauce, tomato, red wine gravy gravy and, of course, red wine! This was followed by a sail change, rewarded by brownies and ice cream. I think we’re all doubting how our stomach sizes will end at the end of this trip – but an army marches on its stomach, or something like that.... We had a great evening over dinner, and perhaps the only pics missing from those you have are the three showing Byron toasting with his red wine, then looking reflective across the waters, and then falling over with laughter as he failed to multi-task throwing some food over the side while holding his red wine – which ended up all over his shorts and the cockpit table.

Btw, for those from the US, you’ll note the Texan flag is still holding up on our starboard flag line (it’s in the spinnaker night shot, rather furled up but if you look carefully you can see it holding on in there...).

Last night was its usual mix – as a result of which we now tend to sail with the spinnaker until a little after dusk and then bring it down to a set-up which is easier to control and to change when shorthanded and in the night. In the early evening we heard a radio call from a British boat Brizo, a Discovery 55 – nice boat btw, who had a lady on the radio struggling with her kitchen set-up (the drawer was stuck, or something like that). Various helpful messages were conveyed by other participants. We called her to note that we have our very-own kitchen fitter [Chris] sitting ready to do his duty. Our offer was to throw Chris over the side, giving her the co-ordinates with which to pick him up so he could come and save the day. This was most appreciated as you can guess but, despite the temptation, we made the call for Chris to stay on our boat, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice to fix it for us here.

This morning, Graham got his daily weather forecast update and plotted it against our positions. The forecast shows good winds from around our latitude for the next week, so we think we can start to level off and head more directly for St Lucia, a course just south of due west! The alternative is to continue more SW but we can continue to monitor and adjust each day.

Finally we realised it’s time for a time-change – by longitude we are now some 1 hr 45 mins behind GMT but we’ve still been using GMT for everything, so we decided last night to change by one hour back today, and then make the next hour change when we get to that longitude, tomorrow or Saturday.